14. Hung Revelations
14
HUNG REVELATIONS
GHOST
“The fuck are you doing here?” Selena whispers when I join her on the roof of Misfit Hall. “I can handle it.”
“I know.” Which bothers me because I don’t want her challenging my skills. I settle down beside her, the moon starting to peek out now that the clouds are clearing. “But I’m still a Misfit, so I gotta go in there and act like one. Just wanted to make sure you were good first.”
“I’m fine,” she says. “Actually feel like…”
I grin behind my mask. “Like what? Like you fit somewhere?”
“Yeah. That.”
Same way I felt when I joined. I loved my dad and siblings, but home never felt like home. As soon as I became a member of Vile House, I got that family feeling, even if it wasn’t in a healthy way. And now, if I were to say I have dreams, they’re all coming true. Not only is my sister becoming a member of Vile House, but my brother lives there, too. We’re together, at least the three of us who remain, living with the family I made for myself.
“What’s up with you lately?” Selena asks. “You’re… off.”
“I’m always off. You worry about you, and I’ll worry about me and Remi.”
Selena huffs. “Oh, I’ll worry about Remi, too. That idiot went and attached himself to the creepiest guy I’ve ever met. Keegan doesn’t even know how to smile.”
“Yeah, but Krypt knows how to protect Remi, so take him as he is.” I laugh. “His creep level has its advantages.”
“Gay?” she whispers at me. “Remi? You ever see that coming?”
I shrug. “Why not?”
“He never gave any indication,” she says.
“Being fucked by a madman sounds slightly tempting.” I grin at her and pull my mask off.
“Yeah? Which madman are you getting fucked by? His brother?” Does she know Killian is Riot?
I grind my teeth together and press my mask to her chest. “Hold this for me. I have a part to play.” I walk across the shingles. “And the day his brother gets in my pants is the day I kill him.”
* * *
After casting my vote and getting a cocky grin from Lock, I leave Misfit Hall as Soren and walk through Moros well after midnight. Soon enough, I won’t have to pretend to be in the gang because Lock will know my true identity. He probably already does, but fuck, it’ll still be an ego boost to rip my mask off and prove it to him. I’ve been repressed in The Misfits for far too long, and I’ve earned my moment of victory. I don’t get them often enough.
The streets are mostly empty, but the cemetery is full of nightcrawlers. Sadie and her Death For Life cult are gathered around their family crypt, doing whatever crazy shit they do to one another. I’d never stoop so low as to willingly die just to come back and protect the living. Fuck that. I protect the living while being a living ghost , and my brother and sister both have me to thank for their current level of safety.
Turning my back on the cemetery, I head down Death Row and see the damaged section. The Ambient Raven has a new front window, but the second one and the door both still need to be replaced. Across the street, I get nostalgic as I look at the place Krypt and I found that nurse dealer who sold Remi the suicide pill. What a deranged night that was—it ended with him eating his own dick and hanging from the front porch of Misfit Hall. I grin to myself, loving memory lane when it portrays me as the wicked hero.
Out the far end of the street, I see the house Willow Olenna kept from her cousin—the guy Riot killed in the bargain hall. I wonder who came to collect her payment. I wonder what it was. I wonder a lot of things, which makes my mind busy, and since it isn’t a safe place, I find myself agitated and unhinged. I don’t want to go back to Vile House to sleep. I’m craving something different, something darker and more volatile.
I’m craving a brush with death just to settle me down. There’s no one here to push me over the edge this time, so instead of heading to Vile House, I head to The Ambient Raven and lock the temporary door behind me. A soft recording lulls the empty shop to sleep, my dad’s piano, Remi’s cello, Selena’s guitar and… I swallow when I hear my violin. The music breaks me enough to get sentimental. I bet if I looked through all Remi’s recordings, I’d find one with all of our instruments together—five siblings and their father, playing a brutal, melancholy theme because we’ve always been comfortable in our anguish together. Until three out of six of us died and we stopped making music.
I take a violin off a stand, inspecting it without touching the bow. If I play, does it mean I’m giving in to something? The only place I’ve created music in the past year is in my bedroom at Vile House in the dead of night, afraid to let my notes meet the light of day. This violin is shiny and new, and while I think I deserve new things, I’m afraid of them, too. This instrument has probably never been played. What if the type of music I force it to create taints it? What if my music befouls the shop Remi loves? What if I’m not glued together well enough to prevent my sinister disease from seeping out, bleeding myself through music into his sacred space? Because I respect this shop…
I miss it here. I miss being in love with music with my brother. I miss family time that isn’t dire, and I miss memories I’ve refused to remember. Being here brings them all back, so I grab the bow and slide down behind the front counter, my back to the wooden cupboards and my ass on the floor, shrouded in shadows.
Closing my eyes, I bring the instrument into position, but I don’t play it. I listen to the recording coming from the speakers around the shop, picking out the notes and the instruments and matching them to a memory of the day we played this piece together. It was after our brother died, and none of us knew how to talk about it, so we played. We played while Mom listened, but now that I think back on it, I don’t think she listened well. She was distracted. Angry at us for ignoring her in favour of the music. But I remember the way my dad’s eyes watered, how Selena kept her face blank but bled her emotions into her guitar, and how Remi stared at the ground the entire time he played his deeply unsettling sounds. I don’t remember what I did or how I looked.
I don’t even remember how I felt. Broken, I guess, but I don’t know if I was broken for myself or for the loss of a sibling. I know I’m selfish, so I was probably more concerned with how it affected me, but as I listen to the recording of my violin, I hear the depth of the emotions I tried so hard to tamp down and hide away.
I’m so lost in the music surrounding me that I don’t notice when I’m no longer alone. I haven’t touched the bow to the strings, and before I can, a thick, heavy rope loops around my neck. The violin clatters to the floor so my fingers can wedge behind the rope, but it’s pulled taut, unremorseful of my current pain.
“Riot!” I shout, knowing it’s him. “Fuck off. Not right now.” Every wound on my body sings out in pain.
“Yes, right now.” His voice comes from behind the counter. I try to look up, the rope biting into my neck harder, and when I see where it leads, my stomach flips. Either in anticipation or fear, probably a combination of both. “Hold on tight, sweetheart.”
I keep my fingers between the rope and my skin, creating as much space as I can while my body is hoisted up, the rope slung over a thick beam. Up and up, my head damn near hitting the beam on the high ceiling of the shop as I’m pulled up to hang. My toes barely touch the front counter, but it’s enough to allow my throat to stay open to breathe a little. Behind me, Riot secures the rope to something, and I look around, wondering what I can reach to cut myself down before he does something disgusting to me.
There’s a knife in my jacket…
“I need the ninety seconds,” I rasp.
The music still plays, but my busy mind from the street is gone, lost to the vibrancy of something I craved—a brush with death. Riot delivers right when I need him to. He plucks nightmares straight from my head, turning them into a warped reality he controls. I don’t like the power that gives him, but I can’t write it all off as unwanted. Killian Hallows is the only man I know who speaks the same depraved language as me.
“Were you gonna play this?” he asks, walking around the counter and picking up the violin I dropped. His finger plucks the strings, agitating my nerves with the dissonant sound. Riot can play the piano almost as well as Krypt, but he hates music because he can’t hide himself in it like I can. When he plays, everything he tries to hide bleeds out, and he refuses to show that weakness to anyone but himself. Fuck, he probably won’t even show it to himself because in his twisted mind, he’s perfect.
My toes dig into the counter, lifting myself as high as I can to get some relief on my throat. With a good grip on the rope, I suck in air and smile at him. Some switch flips in my mind, and instead of simply smiling at him to goad him, I start laughing, my madness showing. I don’t know what it is about Death that I find so fucking funny, but every time I come close to dancing with her, such elation consumes me that joy spills from between my lips.
Because he’s twisted, Riot laughs with me, his grey eyes bright with a lack of morality. “There you are, sweetheart. Batshit and hanging, just how I like you.” He plucks another string, but it doesn’t annoy me so much this time. “Came here to be sad, but instead I turned you mad.”
Nah, he’s wrong. I came here to lose myself to insanity because I’m a masochistic prick when I want to be. Pain, even the emotional kind brought on by sad memories, feels good. Good because it’s so strong. It’s an onslaught of emotions I can’t hide from, and when everything in my life feels so pathetic because I’m the most powerful thing, I love losing myself to my weaknesses. My feelings, fears, and insecurities. I don’t want the world to see them, but I want to buckle under their pressure, let them taunt me hard enough to drive me crazy, and then see how far they’ll push me towards my deathly dance partner.
Except lately, Riot has been the thing pushing me to dance, not my own downfalls.
“Still want to play?” he asks, holding the instrument out to me. “I can hold it for you and you can use one hand for the bow.”
“You don’t wanna hear what kind of music I’d play right now.” I choke when my Adam’s apple presses against the rope, coughing while staring down at him.
“Of course I do,” he says. “But I already know. You aren’t hard to read.”
“No? What am I feeling then?”
He sets the violin on the floor and hops up to join me. He turns my body until I’m sideways on the counter and he’s right in front of me, eye to eye. “Weak. Weak and crazy about it.”
He’s not wrong…
“Delusional because you still think death is the thing you’re chasing.” His grin makes his eyes brighter, and the stubble along his jaw darkens, turning him into a living nightmare. With his hands on my hips, he sways me, spinning us like we’re dancing to a tune that’s austere to me but congenial to him. When he looks into my eyes, I stare, refusing to acknowledge his sweet, shy smile that doesn’t at all match the calamitous situation. I’m choking, literally hanging from the ceiling, and he’s slow-dancing with me like this is a wedding.
“What am I chasing?”
“That’s not the right question.” He looks down my body and back up again. “It’s more about what’s chasing you.”
I scoff. Then cough. “You? You chasing me?”
“Always.” He nods. “But what else? You think you’re knocking on Death’s door, right? Ready to laugh in her face and slam her fingers in it, but she’s not even playing with you, Ghost. This is a one-man game. You pretending to chase her, her rolling her eyes because you never try hard enough to catch her. You think she takes you seriously when you’re clinging to life so hard?” He spins me, catching me in an embrace I loathe.
What fucking part of me is clinging to life harder than I’m chasing death? I want to live, but I don’t want to live just to be alive. I want to defy the concepts of life and trick the only sure thing that comes from being born. A monotonous life isn’t for me. Not even a thrilling one in Vile House. It’s not enough. I need more. More ways to be superior, ultimate, unlike anyone else because I’m Soren fucking Sauder, the man who has yet to succumb to a curse that’s taken almost every male in my family. A living ghost. Dead while alive. I want to be alive in death, too.
“You aren’t chasing shit,” Riot tells me. “You’re running from something.”
I scoff again, my head getting light as I partially hang.
“Monotony. Being average. Fear.”
“What fucking fear?” I kick out at him, ending our dance.
I regret it a second later when he grabs my leg, making me hang for real now that my toes won’t touch the countertop.
“That no one will remember you. When the Ghost of Moros is dead, no one’s going to know who he was. He was just that ghost. Not Soren.”
I splutter, kicking. I want to turn away. Breathing is only second to hiding my face from him because he’s right. I’m just that ghost. No one fucking knows who I am. Soren will be remembered as a temporary part of The Misfits. Not the leader. Not anyone of significance. No one but some guy who was part of some gang for some undisclosed period of time. I’m fucking important! But nobody knows.
Riot laughs, grabbing my other leg as my face turns red. He wraps them around his waist and lifts me up enough to suck in air. His nostrils flare at the redness of my face.
“I love it when you try to hide your insecurities from me. Don’t bother. I see them all and then some.” He laughs some more. I’m not laughing this time. He struck a chord, and now I’m the instrument shrieking through Remi’s shop.
“When’re you going to stop using this bargain as an excuse to stalk me?” I rasp, digging my fingers in and trying to buck him off my legs. All it accomplishes is a moment of panic.
Because when I try to swing him off, he loses balance, almost falling off the counter, and if he falls, he’ll drag me down with him. My neck will snap. I wrap my legs around him tighter to hold him up, my eyes wide—his smile wider.
“Ah, fuck you,” I gasp. Looking up, I see the rope looped over the high beam, wondering how the fuck he got it up there. Was I so lost in listening to my family play music that I tuned everything else out, or was he already here, lurking in the dark, knowing I’d show up at the shop? I better not be that predictable.
“Not until you beg, remember?” His smile morphs into a terrible grin that, resentfully, looks good on him.
The moment pauses, the only sounds coming from me. The beat of my erratic heart, the raspiness of my breaths, and the blood rushing through my ears. The soft music comes through the waterfall a moment later, and when I hear it, I hurt all over again. Because now I’m thinking about my brother, the one who died this way. Hung in our house. A noose around his neck, his body grey but his face still reddish purple, like all the blood got trapped there and congealed after he died. My eyes meet Riot’s, and his grin morphs yet again, this time into something akin to understanding. Not sympathetic or kind, but a thing that represents kinship in horror. Like he knows how to hurt but doesn’t know how to express it, just like me.
I don’t like that it makes us similar.
How’d he get this power over me? For as long as I’ve been a thrill-seeking junkie, I’ve held my own power. I’ve never been submissive, given in to anyone’s dominance unless it’s Director, or fallen short compared to someone else’s power. But Riot keeps winning, and I don’t know what it means. Maybe he’s not winning when I’m the one getting what I want: a brush with death.
I look into his eyes, trying to decipher what he gets out of all this. Why’s he chasing me? What’s in it for him other than bragging rights and the continuation of a rivalry that started years ago? The fuck does he want? His eyes tell me nothing, guarded and masked just like he is. They don’t house monsters like Krypt’s do, nothing roiling or surging from the depths of their confines. Riot’s eyes are deceptively calm and calculating, like he sees everything even if it’s not obvious. But when they storm…
In a weak moment, I ask, “What do you want out of this?”
“Who says I want anything? Maybe I just like reminding you how fucking pathetic you are.”
“Pathetic?”
“For lying to yourself.”
“About what?” I struggle, trying to lower my feet. He grabs my thighs tighter, pulling our bodies close enough that I can feel the heat of his. The hardness of it. I flush with something new, something that took over my mind the night I kissed him in Misfit Hall. I swallow against the rope and keep my eyes on his. “Lying to myself about what?”
“You’re scared of the curse.”
I shake my head, tugging the rope away from my neck as far as it will go.
“You’re scared of succumbing to it before you’re anything noteworthy, which is why you’re taunting it. Because, at least then, you’ll be remembered as the madman who danced with Death.”
My jaw clenches and my fingers go numb.
“Do you want to die, Soren?”
Soren. “No.”
“Then why are you tempting a curse?”
“You know why.” That one or two second precipice. To prove that I’m superior.
“Yeah, I do. But it’s not the same reason you tell yourself.”
What the hell does he think he knows?
Riot leans back, arms spread wide, acting as a weight to hang me. I grip my legs around him as the rope cuts into my neck, cutting off oxygen. I try to heave him back up, but my legs are shaking, my mind is slowing down, and my fingers are being pinched between my skin and the noose, choking me as much as the rope is now.
Riot keeps leaning back, held up only by my legs around his waist. If I release my hold on him, my feet will touch the counter and I’ll be able to breathe, but Riot is proving a point: that he’s in control, so I don’t even bother, wanting to prove I can take whatever he dishes out.
“Here’s a new game. For every lie you tell, I’ll force your body to admit a truth.” His smirk is small but packs a punch.
My stomach sinks.